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BERKELEY â€" Charles Pierce really likes playing video games. He practices piano and violin. He used to study aikido, but lately he's been more interested in taking up fencing. Lately, however, the 13-year-old has mostly been hitting the books.

Charles is the youngest transfer student this fall at the University of California, Berkeley, where he's now in his junior year. His 14-year-old sister, Mayumi, also transferred in this fall as a junior. Attending UC Berkeley is a bit of a family tradition: Their parents, Wincie Pierce and Qin Ma, met and married while they were students at UC Berkeley in the late 1980s.

Aidan Dwyer did a much better job on his 7th grade science project than any of us.

While on a wintertime hike in the Catskills, he noticed the branches of trees held a spiral pattern as they ascended. He wondered if that could possibly serve some purpose, looked into it, and learned about the Fibonacci sequence, which is a mathematical way of describing a spiral. Then he studied tree branches more closely and found their leaves adhered to the sequence. Then he figured out that if he arranged solar panels the way an oak tree arranged its leaves, they were 20 to 50 percent more efficient than the standard straight-line solar arrays. That is why the American Museum of Natural History gave him a Young Naturalist award, and published his findings on its website.

Open to children in grades 1 through 8 who have asthma. Express your asthma control in a colorful poster and you could win great prizes. Your poster might show how you exercise, play team sports, go to camp, participate in band, dance, monitor your breathing, control your asthma triggers, take your medicine, follow your doctor's advice, or use an asthma action plan. [See link for complete contest rules.]

What kind of a system puts a 14 year old kid in jail for a t-shirt? This has to be one of the most bizarre cases of the year. Jared Marcum was arrested at Logan Middle School back in April.

His only apparent crime seems to be in his choice of wardrobe for the day. Fox News reported on April 23rd: The teen's lawyer, Ben White, says school administrators maintain that Marcum disrupted the educational process. He says Marcum was exercising his right to free speech and wasn't disruptive. Logan police arrested Marcum at the school last Thursday after he refused a teacher's order to remove the shirt. White says prosecutors are reviewing the case to determine whether to file charges. Marcum has said that he was arrested on charges of disrupting an educational process and obstructing an officer, though White said Monday that the Logan County prosecutor's office is reviewing the case to decide whether to proceed. Marcum wore the same shirt to school Monday. It displays the NRA logo and a hunting rifle.

A 14-year-old home schooler wants to play football for Walker Valley High this fall, and the Bradley County School Board is slated to rule on his request on Thursday.

All four of the secondary principals said they are against allowing the homeschoolers. Danny Coggin, Walker Valley principal, said he has 1,546 students and they are the most important to him. Todd Shoemaker, principal of Bradley Central, said of his 1,740 students the football players wear their letterman jackets with pride. "It's not just about Friday night," he said. The middle school principals agreed.

Nine North Dakota State University football players are among 15 people who were formally charged Friday with faking petition signatures in a scandal that blocked two voter initiatives from getting on the November ballot.

The 15 are scheduled for their first court appearance Oct. 2 in Fargo, said Birch Burdick, the Cass County state's attorney. They were charged Friday with a misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. Of the 15 defendants, 12 are present or former members of NDSU's football team, which is the defending NCAA Football Championship Subdivision champion.

Make sure to play the playfully poignantly little ditty as you peruse the perilously precisely pictorials below. We should add that despite this tune's 'calling out' of The One, both sides in DC feed from the same trough.

A 16-year-old Castle High School junior attempted suicide on the school's parking lot early today, shooting himself in the head with a small caliber handgun that he had inside a sport utility vehicle, according to Warrick Sheriff Marvin Heilman.

Heilman identified the student as Blake Sales, and the sheriff said he didn't yet know who owned the gun or how Sales came to have it today. The student's condition, Heilman said, is "very grave."

Authorities at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport have held up a shipment of 18 human heads sent from Rome and bound for a facility in the U.S. where they would be used in anatomical research.

A spokeswoman for the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office, Mary Paleologos (PEHL'-ee-oh-loh-gohs), says the heads were properly preserved, wrapped and tagged as human specimens and there is no suggestion of foul play. It was not immediately clear why customs officials had held up the shipment.